Opinion

Should Conservatives Watch Violent Movies?

In defense of Run Hide Fight—but not of “WAP”

   DailyWire.com
Run Hide Fight
The Daily Wire

Last week the Daily Wire premiered its first feature film, Kyle Rankin’s Run Hide Fight. The results were: impressive viewership numbers, glowing audience reviews, and a predictable outpouring of dyspeptic condemnation from critics who found fault with the movie once they realized it had been picked up for distribution by a conservative outlet.

All of this, it’s fair to say, represents a resounding success for the Wire’s new incursion into the fictional creative world. If the gatekeepers of that world took the time to savage the movie in print, they must be getting antsy about the potential for cultural success it represents. To paraphrase my colleague James Poulos, when the eye of Sauron turns upon you, you know you’re getting close to infiltrating and destroying Mordor.

There were also, from some of the Daily Wire’s most devoted fans, concerns about Run Hide Fight’s nudity and strong language. Those concerns are representative of more widespread conservative misgivings about narrative art — and art more generally — which showcases the grittier, more violent aspects of life. So much of the explicit content featured in legacy and prestige venues — Netflix, Hollywood, the top 40 music charts — is either debauched (like Cardi B’s infamous “WAP”) or outright evil (like Netflix’s misbegotten child-exploitation flick, Cuties).

Whatever the artistic “merits” of such doggerel (on which, more below), anyone with a shred of moral dignity could be forgiven for wanting it nowhere near his children or indeed himself. We have a deeply felt intuition that art which shoves our faces in immorality doesn’t just disgust us but degrade us, in some way over which we don’t have total control. The chattering classes are intent on pouring filth into our eyes and ears, and despite our dedicated resistance, we worry that we can’t shield ourselves entirely from corruption.

I don’t want to dismiss or belittle those worries in any way — to the contrary, I share them all and want to take them very seriously. But I do want to suggest that in the case of Run Hide Fight, they’re misplaced. In the process I hope I’ll help us as conservatives to think about this question — the question of art’s morality — in a way that goes deeper than the churn of the daily news cycle. Because as it happens this is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, issues in Western artistic criticism: how do we affirm all the richness of art and its potential to edify, without leaving ourselves at the mercy of its dangerous power to seduce?

The Danger of Art

In the first-ever complete work of literary criticism, the Poetics, Aristotle made an observation that strikes at the heart of the problem. He was arguing that imitation (in Greek, mimēsis) is a fundamental human act and comes from deep in our souls: “imitation is engrained in man’s nature from childhood — in this, he is different from all the other animals. He is the most imitative of them all.”

Aristotle was developing an observation his teacher Plato had made in a number of places — particularly his last great unfinished work, the Laws. Both philosophers noticed that babies and young children learn all sorts of things long before they are able to understand rational arguments or even language. And the way they learn is through imitation, in the form of nursery rhymes, songs, and lessons that they can hear from their parents and parrot back. Preschool teachers still work this way: they teach with games, dances, and songs that can be seen and mimicked.

Art is a highly refined and sophisticated form of this basic human impulse to imitate. That’s where we get our idea that great art is supposed to represent reality — not the facts of something that actually happened, but the truth of inner experiences which can’t be conveyed except in narrative form. When we make movies or sing songs, we use sounds and images to recreate and imitate what a certain experience is like for the people having it. And because humans have a natural impulse to imitate, the audience who sees a good representation spontaneously feels some of the feelings represented.

There’s an inherent pleasure and delight that comes with doing something natural to us. That’s why Aristotle noted that imitation itself is pleasurable, even if what’s being imitated is something awful. “There is proof of this in real-life experience, for we enjoy looking at accurate images of things which are painful to see in themselves: monstrous beasts, for example, and corpses.” And here’s our whole problem. No matter what is shown in art, if it’s depicted skillfully and well, we can often enjoy seeing the depiction. That enjoyment is primal, deep, and pre-rational. It’s been with us since infancy, and that makes it powerful — more powerful, even, than reasoned arguments.

This is one of the reasons why Plato famously exiled poets from his perfect city in the Republic: it’s not that he didn’t like them, it’s just that they had too much power. Grab hold of people’s imaginations through skillful depictions and stories, and you can work your way into their hearts in a way that’s very hard to talk them out of — even if what you’re showing them is immoral and debased.

The Artist’s Responsibility

Hence the power of the modern American Left: they own the culture, so they can manipulate huge crowds despite the total failure of their ideas. But in reality you can’t, and shouldn’t, banish artists from a society the way Plato fantasized about doing. Art is too basic a human instinct for that, and it’s the only way to convey certain spiritual and emotional realities which go beyond mere material facts. So instead of giving up on art altogether, conservatives like the Daily Wire guys have started to respond to the Left in kind: you don’t fight false stories with factual arguments. You fight false stories with true stories.

This is the crucial thing that has to make us different: the fact that art represents something means it has to represent it truly. Otherwise it’s a lie — and a bitterly corrosive lie at that. The rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian taught that good compositions need to “move, delight, and instruct.” Those are the three essential things that art can do in ways nothing else does: it stirs our emotions, it gives us rapturous pleasure, and it shows us the world.

But because that world is so broken, skillful artists can divorce the truth-telling function of art from its emotional properties — they can move us powerfully while instructing us falsely. This is the real reason why “WAP” is a vile song. It’s not because it’s sexually explicit: sex acts are a part of life. Much of Western visual art involves nudity and sexuality — look up Tintoretto’s “Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan” for one among innumerable examples.

Even things like the promiscuity and self-abasement Cardi B displays in “WAP,” though they’re grievously wrong to indulge in, are real things: they exist in this fallen world of ours, and art should have some mature way of acknowledging that. The fact that Cardi B does so isn’t her problem.

No, her real failure as an artist is that she doesn’t just depict promiscuity: she tells a lie about it. The song and the video make what she’s doing look easy, fun, empowering, and consequence-free. In real life — and especially for people who, unlike Cardi B, don’t have millions of dollars on hand to sweep up the mess — prostrating yourself for easy sex is a miserable, painful, damaging thing. Countless women, even as they nod their heads along to “WAP,” are finding themselves abandoned, lonely, depressed, and spiritually bereft because they’ve been sold a bill of goods about sex that just isn’t true. That’s the terrible power of art that lies.

But art that tells the truth doesn’t have to censor itself from showing ugly realities: it just has to be honest about them. This was a philosophy that was popular when Shakespeare — whose plays are saturated with gore and sex — displayed the full array of human life on stage. “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” says Shakespeare’s Hamlet: the purpose of art is not to sanitize the world but “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

This means that when Shakespeare wrote about Macbeth’s regicide and murderous ascent to power, he also showed his and his wife’s descent into fatal nihilism and madness. He didn’t shy away from showing bloodshed, but he showed it taking place in a moral universe, where bloodshed has consequences and guilt brings misery upon the heads of the guilty. That’s the real world we live in, too.

As much as we might like to get away from this, we can’t. Shakespeare’s rough contemporary, Philip Sidney, pointed out in his Defense of Poesy that even Jesus Christ used stories to convey the profundity of what he had to say, rather than cut-and-dry moral lessons. The Lord knew that narrative and allegory “would more constantly, as it were, inhabit both the memory and judgment.” There is something foundational about stories at the core of who we are and what we’re meant to do. That’s what makes it so urgent that we not tell stories which distort the truth and pervert reality. But at the same time, it means we can’t escape showing the whole world as it is, evil and all.

What it Means for Us

So take, for example, a series like HBO’s Game of Thrones — another one about which Christians and conservatives often worry. There’s a reason why the sex is more corrupting in that show than the violence: it’s often completely disconnected from what the story is portraying. That’s what makes it feel unnecessary: it’s not that beautiful women don’t sometimes have sex in reality. It’s that to make art about that fact, you have to take it seriously and show the essence of what that particular sex is like. So when women are undulating in the background of an exposition scene that has nothing to do with them, it’s not art, it’s titillation: pleasure without instruction.

On the other hand, the violence in Game of Thrones is very often tightly bound to the characters and their relationships. Without spoiling anything, consider the character arc of Tyrion Lannister: almost everything he does, violent or not, is expressive of his inner self. That’s truth. That’s art.

Here’s the thing, then: school shootings happen. In them, violence occurs. People who are feeling panicked and vulnerable, as well as bad guys who are victimizing the innocent, say bad words. They also say them differently, for different reasons, and with different consequences, depending on their characters and circumstances. Nudity and sex are also real parts of life. All of these things are true, and all of them — in my estimation — are depicted with honesty in Run Hide Fight.

It’s a good reason not to show the movie to kids — children are a different ball game entirely, and everyone knows we want adults to be able to think about and do some things that aren’t suitable for impressionable young minds. But it’s not a good reason to condemn the movie. One reason why it’s broken out of the typical “conservative film” mold is because it’s not squeamish about acknowledging and portraying the full array of human affairs. That’s a good thing. It’s an essential thing. If we want to get serious about making our mark on the culture — and we have to — then one indispensable part of that will be giving artists latitude to be frank about what goes on in this world of sin.

You can, in other words, condemn “WAP” and Cuties without trying to scrub all the sex and violence out of the world. We can hold both lines in this fight at once: we can oppose the banality and decadence of modern pop culture, while striking out to make good, robust art of our own. In order to win both fights, we only have to do one thing: we have to tell the truth.

Spencer Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Booksand The American Mind. He can be reached on Twitter at @SpencerKlavan.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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